other operations had to be stopped in order to transmute rapidly common materials into gold, irelium, or diamonds; but it could be done, and they had no need to dig into the bowels of the earth like other men for the more precious metals and crystals which had accumulated there in the volcanic or chemical past. It was one of their commonest sayings that no science which was not creative was worthy of the name. True, there were often long tracts of scientific investigation that seemed entirely barren; and many of their researches seemed to lead nowhither. But when I inquired more minutely I found that the investigators had realised many of the practical applications of the discovery when once they should reach it. They regarded as futile all abstract inquiries which had only a distant and unforeseen chance of ending in something useful. Even their astronomy had a keen eye to the possibilities of their future; it led not only to a deeper knowledge of the living heart of creation, and to a wider enjoyment of the pleasures of imagination and faith, but to the purposes of the immediate life; it gave them immortal forms for their art and especially their architecture; it moulded or suggested their divinest music; it brought into even their physical life influences unlike those of the earth, and they hoped with full faith that through this they might catch the wandering thoughts or voices of the beings of other worlds and at last reach the power of emigration from star to star. Their most creative science was chemistry; for this had reached the secrets of nature’s most mysterious processes, and had imitated and generally abbreviated the workings of her great laboratory. The Limanorans did not need to grow the plants and trees that used to produce their food. Agriculture had ceased to be necessary for them except as a part of landscape-gardening. The elements and combinations that used to be extracted from their harvests in order to support and exhilarate life could be created directly in the chemical laboratories. Everything needed as diet was drawn straight from the earth without the long process of growth and culmination. They had the prime factors of sustenance in unlimited quantity and purest form with the minimum of labour, and they could give to these the exact quality and refinement which would bear them straight to the various tissues or cells of the body without the need of its offensive chemical processes. Most of the chemistry of life-sustenance was accomplished before the food entered the human system, and the space and energy of the body that had before gone to the alimentary processes of life were now free for other and higher functions. Pharmacy and chemical science combined to create all that the constitution required not only for its support and frictionless continuance, but for its progress towards longer life and more ethereal texture. Their medicine had ages before passed the crude stage of mere cure of disease.